Now that's just mean...

...messing with future archaeologist's minds this way:

"Darth Vader Rises

To fulfill the ancient tradition of placing grotesques on cathedrals, an image of Darth Vader from the Star Wars trilogy was sculpted and set high up in the northwest tower of the Washington National Cathedral. See other grotesques there at www.cathedral.org."

From the ThisOldHouse.com site.

Note to self - check on the water!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-7030889,00.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,303716,00.html

The state of Georgia gets an average of 50 inches of rain a year, has numerous rivers and streams and several federally funded reservoirs to hold their "excess" water for public use. In spite of this embarassment of water riches (well, compared to most western states, anyway) the citizens of Georgia have effectively just about run out of water this fall. That's pretty scary, if you think about it. What caused this to happen?

A drought which began just a year and a half ago has definitely taxed water reserves. Critics also cite poor planning, which allowed several opportunities to build state funded reservoirs to boost the federal reservoir system to pass by the wayside due to corporate selfishness and political posturing. (One of the pushes to build more reservoirs was apparently deliberately scuttled when construction companies discovered they wouldn't be able to build and sell expensive, fancy homes on the new "lakeside lots"...) Another problem, at least reading between the lines here, seems to be rampant consumavore water usage by the 9 million residents of the state and a near total lack of planning to deal with the water needs of the state's burgeoning population.

Let's face it - a one year drought, while unfortunate, isn't enough to make a well-run state water system run nearly completely dry. Heck, I've lived in areas where the residents get by on a quarter of the annual rainfall that Georgia normally gets, and droughts of 5-7 years in a row are not uncommon. While the water situation at the end of a long drought can be pretty scary, I've never seen one even close to the desperate situation facing the citizens of the peach state now. All nine million of them.

If I'd had to guess a year ago which state would be facing a water crisis this year, I certainly wouldn't have named Georgia! I'd probably have guessed one of the western, water-poor states - but I suppose relatively water-poor states probably have a much better grasp of the need to conserve their precious fresh water supply. It will be interesting to see what comes of this. When the current drama is over, will the citizens of Georgia learn to reign in their usage and invest in their fresh water infrastructure, or will they continue on blindly until the next water crisis hits and sit around pointing fingers at everyone else again?

Note to self: get some good, solid information on the water supplies locally, and see how much more we can conserve here at home.

Days of Wine and Vinegar

Last year, I made my very first batch of home-made vinegar.

I took about a half gallon of plum juice from our fall harvest of blue italian plums and some vinegar "mother" I found lurking in a grey blobbish mass at the bottom of an old bottle of balsamic vinegar and put them together and let the whole mess sit for about 6 weeks. When the 6 weeks was over, my hubby and I tasted the results and decided it was by far the very best vinegar either of us had ever tasted - but because we'd already dried or canned all the plums for the season, we had to wait another year to try it again.

So this year, I have about TWO gallons of both plum and apple cider vinegar going, plus one gallon of cherry wine vinegar, and one gallon each of plum wine, cherry wine, and apple wine. Because the temps down in the storage room are a bit cool now, everything has to be upstairs where it's 70 degrees. But the problem is I just realized today that by bringing all these burping, burbling jugs up here to brew I've lost about a third of my kitchen counter space until close to the end of the year. Ooops.

Actually, I think I may have gone a bit brew crazy. I was thinking about meads and wheat beers the other night when I was trying to fall asleep. And I've already made plans to try to brew some balsamic vinegar as soon as I can. It turns out from my research that it's really not that difficult - all you do differently is condense the grape must down to about 1/3 of its original volume, cool it, then seed it with "mother" and proceed as usual. Oh, there is that little bit about aging it for a while - um, maybe a few years...but other than that it's all business as usual.

And given the state of my storage room at the moment, I'm sure I can find a place to store (er...lose) a jug of home made balsamic vinegar for a couple of years at least...

It must be age catching up with me

I am apparently becoming all too predictable.

A bit of background - we have three small dogs. Because I'm "momma" and was mainly responsible for daily care and training of the two newest additions when we got them earlier this year, I am now the center of their universe. They follow me everywhere I go. And I do mean everywhere. And I do mean follow. Closely. On my heels, as it were. I can't walk down the hall without feeling little puppy noses "bumping" the back of my calves. It's a dog thing, I've been told. But because of this, I've started to call the three of them my "pup-arazzi."

So, fast forward to this morning. I had a really busy last couple of days. I spent a lot of time on the road, on my feet, and away from home, so I was a little beat last night. As a result, I slept in for a while this morning. At least, I slept in until the puparazzi decided it was time for me to get up. When I finally heeded the gentle nosings and subvocal whinings and got up, they joyously danced around my feet for a minute, then both of the pups ran ahead of me to the master bathroom. When they got there, they promptly sat at tail-wagging attendance - one on each side of the potty. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry - apparently they've picked up on my morning "routine" and have decided that 1) I need support and encouragement because of my advancing age, or 2) I need an honor guard, or 3) I need a life guard.

I think I've decided that I don't really want to know what they're thinking. I'll probably be happier that way.

Beauty (or rocks) are in the eye of the beholder

I had a small booth at a local craft show this weekend. Although it was snowing, there were a lot of people out walking and gawking. Maybe they figured the weekend was shot anyway, so why not go shopping? Or perhaps all the white stuff falling from the sky made them think about the upcoming holiday gift season. But whatever the reason, I probably talked to more people this weekend than I usually do in several months.

I had some of my glass artwork there - mostly beads and miniature vessels - and some of the questions I was asked were hilarious. One lady stopped at my booth, looked astonished, and exclaimed "where did you find these pretty rocks? How did you polish them?" Honestly, most of my stuff looks nothing like rocks. Then there were the folks who simply didn't know what these little things with holes were.

Them: "What are these things?"
Me: "Um, they are beads. See, they have little holes for stringing?"
Them: "Beads? (skeptical look) What do you do with them?"
Me: "Well, some people like to make jewelry out of them."
Them: "Really?"
Me, to myself: "No, not really, I just sell pretty polished rocks with holes in them for no particular reason..."

Of course I was very polite, but inside I was laughing. I know this is a bit of a backwater place here, but c'mon - do you mean to tell me you've never seen beads before? I guess some people just don't get out much. Another guy asked if what I did was like what another vendor who sells plates, and when I said "no, she mostly forms her stuff with a kiln, and I use a torch" he said "oh, so you're primitive!" I didn't quite know how to take that, but I decided to laugh and take it as a joke. But, who knows - maybe he had a mental image of me sitting cross-legged in a cave somewhere melting glass rods over the smoky end of a big burning stick?

Then there were about half a dozen people who simply had no idea that one could actually melt glass. I didn't ask them how they thought bottles and jars were made - maybe chiseled and polished one by one from huge natural glass crystals? *shrug*

I think the big surprise this weekend is how popular my "orphan" basket was. Orphans are beads that started life as experiments, or are leftovers from sets I put together. I sold dozens this weekend. I guess some of the reason for their popularity, beside the fact that they were cheap, is the "hunting for treasure" thing. I debated whether to bring these oddballs at all, but I remembered some of the beads I've had on auction before that I thought weren't very special ended up getting the most bids. So I brought them. In retrospect, I'm glad I did. Beads that I really didn't personally like very much found homes with people who thought they were just the best ever. I think there is probably a life lesson hiding in this story somewhere. Maybe it's that beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. If so, I guess rocks probably are, too.

This Place is Dangerous

No, not this place, THIS PLACE. Turns out there is one just a couple of hours from here. I went with a good friend this weekend, and my oh my. I had to keep reminding myself that my latest goal is to get rid of extra stuff, not come home with a bunch more! Although, they do have a lot of interesting organizational items that I might be able to make use of as I work on paring down and organizing the house...and I've just got to get me some of that lingonberry juice concentrate next time I'm down there - yum!

On another note, it's been years since I last made a purely social local friendship, and I hadn't realized until recently how much I've missed that. Atomic Wombat is a witty, fun person to be around, and that made the shopping trip a whole lot of fun. We even laughed when my otherwise very brilliant husband gave us wrong directions and we ended up driving up and down the same stretch of road three times in half an hour - waving to Ikea each time we passed it - yet again. The main roads in Salt Lake City go by numbers, not names, and the exit to the oriental grocery store was at exit 9000, not 90,000 (which doesn't exist.)

We were actually clear over in the next valley before we put two and two together and decided that there was indeed an extra zero mucking up my hubby's directions, despite his insistence to the contrary. As soon as we divided his directions by 10, we had the right exit and the rest of the trip went more smoothly. Except that I apparently snored while I snoozed in the car on the way back. Ooops. I blame it on falling asleep while sitting up. Yeah, that's it.

Momma, momma! It's snowing outside!

This is our fourth winter here, and this is by far the earliest it's snowed for us. We woke up Saturday morning to this:


The furry puppy-kids were, of course, ecstatic over the change in weather. This was their first snow. They kept running in and out and in and out, and in the process got pretty wet and muddy. Here's a picture of the little scruffians after a romp and a wrestle outside in the snowy grass. "Momma, momma, snow is really cool!" (Notice the wagging tail blurs - they were having a blast - it didn't seem to bother them at all!)


Of course, if I had a built in fur coat like that it probably wouldn't bother me, either. That's just a preview of how they looked most of the day - they got much wetter and scruffier before the day was through. Needless to say, they both got a good bath and brushing on Sunday.